Happy Talk

Roger CleggDisparate Impact

Let me elaborate a bit on the important development, regarding the Trump administration and the dubious “disparate impact” approach to civil-right enforcement, that I discussed in an earlier email this month. Not only has the Trump administration done the right thing in rescinding the Obama-era guidance aggressively taking the “disparate impact” approach with respect to school discipline, but the Washington Post reports that this action reflects a larger skepticism in the administration about the approach throughout executive-branch agencies. Good. As conservatives have long argued, this approach to civil-rights enforcement is bad law and bad policy for any number of reasons. …

Coercive Federalism

Terry EastlandUncategorized

Three years ago I wrote this piece about Westchester County for The Weekly Standard. What piqued my interest was the county’s decision to quit seeking federal housing grants. There is, of course, no obligation upon a county to pursue such grants (not to mention a variety of others). But the, shall we say, guts it took for Westchester to shake off the grant—seeking habit were notable then and still are in a nation (alas) of coercive federalism, and too little freedom. Forty-five municipalities and communities make up Westchester County, the prosperous, heavily Democratic jurisdiction just north of New York City …

Disparate Impact Delenda Est

Roger CleggDisparate Impact

Happy New Year!  And I’m happy to be able to start 2019 with some good news:  The Trump administration appears to be headed in the right direction on the issue of “disparate impact.”  Below are slightly edited versions of my latest three posts over the holiday season and into the new year on National Review Online, each dealing with this important issue. I should add that, at the end of last week, the Washington Post had a news story confirming this trend, and predictably the New York Times had an editorial over the weekend decrying it — but both the …

The power of giving the right speech at the right time

Terry EastlandUncategorized

How Edwin Meese saved originalism.  In this piece, published in the penultimate issue of The Weekly Standard, I recalled my time working on speeches for President Reagan’s first two attorneys general, William French Smith and Edwin Meese. The most consequential speech of the many that Meese gave was his address to the American Bar Association in 1985, titled “A Jurisprudence of Original Intention.” It was a speech that stimulated a debate on legal interpretation that continues still today and which has lent support to the principles of nondiscrimination and colorblind law. Like not a few who’ve worked in political Washington, …

2018 CEO Activities Report

Roger CleggUncategorized

In addition to the Center for Equal Opportunity’s speaking on campuses and other venues, media outreach, and general research and writing (in National Review Online, Commentary Magazine, The New York Times, and other magazines, newspapers, and publications), here are just a few highlights of CEO’s work this past year.  An overarching point:  Last year, we hired former Reagan administration official, author, and prominent affirmative action critic, Terry Eastland, as our new senior fellow. He has been working on a variety of anti-preference projects, joining forces with CEO research fellow Althea Nagai, who published an important article on microaggressions and critical …

Looking Back at Bakke: Are Racial Preferences in Admissions Permanent?

Terry EastlandRacial Preferences

Harvard was not a party in Bakke, but it was the most important opinion in that landmark case. It deserves to be read together with the filings in the ongoing Harvard racial admissions discrimination case, which was argued in October and the decision in which could come any time. It’s remarkable that one school could figure so prominently in two major cases raising many of the same issues, but that is what we have here. The 1978 Bakke case included an opinion that sanctioned use of the diversity rationale by which applicants lacking the race necessary for a sufficiently racial …

Felons and Federalists, Pelosi and Preferences

Roger CleggUncategorized

Last month the Washington Post published my response to an op-ed written by one of its columnists, Michael Gerson, on felon voting.  Here’s what I wrote: “If you’re not willing to follow the law yourself, then you should not have a role in making the law for everyone else, which is what you do, directly or indirectly, when you vote.  Mr. Gerson implied that Florida’s law was racially motivated, but a federal court of appeals ruled [[11-1] in 2005 that it was not.  “We have certain minimum, objective standards of responsibility and commitment to our laws that we require before entrusting …

Did Juan Williams libel LU’s Hans Bader?

CEO StaffDisparate Impact

From:libertyunyielding.com Did Juan Williams libel LU’s Hans Bader? By Jerome Woehrle In a recent book that got bad reviews from many readers, Juan Williams attacked LU’s Hans Bader. The book contains some clearly false statements. Williams attributes to Bader things that are the opposite of what Bader in fact said. I am not a libel lawyer, but I wonder if these false statements constitute libel. Bader criticized the Obama administration’s school-discipline guidance, which put pressure on school systems to have equal suspension rates for students of different races, even when misbehavior rates aren’t the same. In response, a few school districts, such as Minneapolis, adopted racial quotas in suspensions. …

20 Bad Arguments

Roger CleggEducation

Earlier this month, the trial ended in the lawsuit brought against Harvard University, challenging the school’s racially preferential admission system as illegally discriminating against Asian Americans.  The Center for Equal Opportunity has followed the matter closely, issuing two studies documenting Harvard’s discrimination that you can read here and here, and helping to write and joining an amicus brief in the case that you can read here.  And earlier this month, John S. Rosenberg — who edits the blogsite www.discriminations.us — and I wrote the piece below that appeared (slightly revised) in The Weekly Standard. The 20 Arguments for Discriminating Against …

Excluding by Race

Terry EastlandRacial Preferences

With countless Democrats eager to run for president in 2020, and with race a doubtless campaign topic in the short two years ahead, maybe some of the would-be Democratic candidates will see the merits of something President Obama once said, namely that the America he sees and celebrates is “not a black America and white America and Latino America or Asian America” but “the United States of America.” Obama said that during his breakthrough speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Alas, his tenure too often encouraged Americans to see themselves in terms of color and ethnicity, as I argued in …